The performance of analyses of large data sets (e.g., what is commonly referred to as “big data”) is becoming increasingly commonplace in such areas as simulations, process monitoring, decision making, behavioral modeling and making predictions. Such analysis are often performed by grids of varying quantities of available node devices, while the data sets are often stored within a separate set of storage devices. This begets the challenge of efficiently exchanging such large data sets between storage devices and varying ones of the node devices among a grid of node devices.